National Cattlemen’s Beef Association representative Kaitlynn Glover misrepresents the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 in her comments in the Capital Press’ June 25 article, “NCBA, PLC further cattle priorities.”

There is no penalty for “disturbance” to birds under this venerable, 102-year-old law. It only prohibits the “taking” (i.e., killing) of birds. That’s a big distinction, and makes the law far less draconian than Ms. Glover would have us believe. In fact, as a percentage of all criminal cases undertaken by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service between 1999 and 2016, MBTA prosecutions dropped from 24 to 5%.

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act was purposefully negotiated between the United States and Great Britain (for Canada) in the middle of war, in 1916. In 1918 (again, in the middle of pandemic and continued world war), the U.S. Senate codified it into U.S. law. Birds must have been very important to America’s leaders to compete with such far-more-pressing priorities, don’t you suppose? In subsequent years, Mexico, Japan, and Russia joined the U.S. in treaties to protect a common resource that’s universally regarded as transcending national boundaries and meriting enlightened international cooperation.

This law set in motion a system by which conservationist-hunters engage in regulated hunting, helping to restore bird populations severely depleted a century ago. They’ve been incredibly successful. But the damage a single waterfowl hunter might cause by hunting out of season, or exceeding the annual bag limit, is now far outweighed by the damage that unscreened fish farms, poorly-sited wind turbines, or open cyanide leach pits at mining operations in the intermountain West, for example, can cause to birds by the dozens, or the hundreds. The little guy’s individual imprint has been overtaken by the far-more impactful actions of the big boys.

The Trump administration proposes to hold the individual hunter accountable if birds are taken illegally … but to give big companies and corporations a “pass” as long as they assert that their killing of migratory birds wasn’t intentional. That’s exceedingly poor public policy. And that’s why virtually every former director of the Fish and Wildlife Service since the Nixon administration — Republicans and Democrats alike — and every top migratory bird expert have said this abrupt and radical policy shift is a bad idea. It undercuts the very successful track record of cooperation between the Service and private industry in minimizing bird killing with intelligent and quite feasible changes in screening, hazing, and siting at industrial operations. We now risk junking many decades’ worth of progress through this sop to a very few “bad actors” who have resisted obeying the law that most other folks follow.

One point on which Ms. Glover was quite correct — she used the word “existed” (past tense) in her quote, “Those penalties were a huge burden and a huge threat to those who operate where migratory birds existed.” Given the hemispheric decline in populations of many species of migratory songbirds, Ms. Glover very accurately implies that birds may be a thing of the past if we do not maintain bedrock conservation laws like the Migratory Bird Treaty Act — agreements among hunters, state governments, and foreign countries to regard birds as a shared economic and natural resource. We consider “exist” is a much better word than “existed.”

David Klinger

(U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 1977-2012/retired)

Boise, Idaho